DESCRIPTION: Each year billions of health care dollars are spent on medical devices that fail in clinical practice. These device failures occur over various timescales of the devices and are due to multiple factors including thrombosis, inflammation, infection, and tissue overgrowth on the surface of the implanted device as well as mechanical device failures. Over the last 50 years much has been learned about these device failures and attempts have been made to prevent failures using (1) alternative systemic drug therapies, (2) surface modifications on the device, or (3) a combination of both approaches. Despite efforts to improve the efficacy of blood-contacting and implantable medical devices, the incompatibility of these materials within human blood and tissue still causes serious complications in patients. Thus, systemic or regional drug therapies such as heparin remain necessary. As a result, strategies that can leverage the biological properties of naturally occurring bioagents such as nitric oxide (NO) have clear implications for a wide variety of medical devices. These materials offer localized control of function only at the blood-material interface where bioactivity is targeted. The strategy of this research focuses on developing materials that can produce NO from endogenous sources for extended periods of time and will overcome the fundamental limitations of current NO materials. Using metal organic frameworks (MOFs) as NO catalysts, device coatings will now be able to (1) produce significantly high levels of nitric oxide and (2) allow systematic modification while maintaining the structural properties that make them suitable for clinical applications. Therefore, the principal premise of this project investigator is to utilize the inherent structural features o MOF materials to develop physiologically-relevant NO catalysts. As a part of this exploratory grant, the new MOFs will be prepared, blended into device coatings and rigorously tested for their long-term function and mechanical properties, and finally evaluated for safety via toxicity studies and characterized by an array of in vitro bioassays. The outcomes of the studies performed will be used to translate the most promising composite formulations to future in vivo models.